Balmont, Konstantin Dmitrievich, 1867-1942

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont [Константин Дмитриевич Бальмонт] was a Russian symbolist poet and translator, a major figure of the Silver Age of Russian poetry. Despite his early participation in student demonstrations and writing of revolutionary poetry for which in 1901 he had been banned from living in the University cities for three years, he grew disappointed with the October Revolution and in 1920 left Russia for good and settled in France.

Lydia [Lilly] Noble (1884-1929) was a poet and translator born into the family of a prominent British journalist Edmund Noble (1853-1937) and his Russian-born wife Lydia Lvovna Pimenoff-Noble [Лидия Львовна Пименова-Нобль] (1865-1934). She was born in Russia, but raised together with her younger sister Beatrice Noble (1886-?) in Malden, Massachusetts after the family moved to the United States where her father worked as a correspondent of the Boston Herald . Konstantin Balmont became a friend of the family, particularly, Lydia Lvovna Pimenoff-Noble and Lydia Noble. Lydia Noble translated poems and articles of Balmont into English. She was also a poet and essayist in her own right, and some of her poems were translated into Russian by Konstantin Balmont.